Social media is a great way for companies to interact with and influence their customers. Retail, restaurant, and tech companies in particular can find these platforms a great way to reach thousands of their customers to make purchases. However, if you’re not a B2C but instead a B2B company, you’re focused not on attracting hundreds or thousands of individuals, but instead a few companies. In order to succeed on this front, it’s important to not only understand how you have to change your messaging, but also how to gain the interest of those industries.
Make Sure Your Branding is Aimed at Industries
Before your first post, tweet, status, or ‘gram, it’s important to get your ducks in a row when it comes to your branding. It’s important to set up your social media accounts to attract the businesses you’re interested in selling to or partnering with. While this differs from platform to platform, here are three key takeaways:
Picking the Right Voice for Your Industry
It’s important to pick the right voice – the tone, terminology, and expertise of your social media posting – before you get started. For B2B companies, this often is about providing education over excitement and showing expertise over entertainment. Check out our blog, Industry Facing vs Client Facing: Picking the Right Voice, for more tips.
Be Authentic and Consistent
Make sure your imagery, logos, contact information, and other sources of information are consistent (they are in line with all your online presences, from websites to listing services) and transparent (the tone and claims don’t vary wildly from platform to platform). Our CEO Laura DiBenedetto has a heart-to-heart about it here.
Have the Right Landing Pages on Your Website
Your goal is to not only engage with companies on these social media platforms but also get them into your sales funnels. To do that, you need to link back to your website. As mentioned above, these need to be consistent in branding, but you also need to make sure they have clear calls to action and more. See our blog, Industry Specific Website Pages You Need for Your Site, for specific website pages you should have for your industry,
Don’t Target Businesses, Target Individuals in Those Businesses
It should come as no surprise that businesses are simply collections of people. It’s your job to find your ideal candidates within those companies to target. Depending on your sales and industry, this can include a variety of titles and job descriptions.
- Owner/Operators: For small or even one-man-companies, the owner is also the primary worker in the company. Messaging should include alleviating/outsourcing work and stress from their plate or helping their business grow.
- CEOs: The leaders of companies are tricky – the larger the company, the less they are invested in day-to-day operations and problems. They are interested in the big picture and long-term growth: make sure to target that in your messaging.
- VPs: The workhorses of any company, the vice presidents handle operations within the company. Look for ways to become helpful to them in solving problems in their workforce or department.
- Treasury/CFOs: These individuals hold the purse strings of larger companies. It’s up to you to convince them that your products and services will save them money – or be worth the expense.
- Specialties: The more specialized or niche your product, the further down the company latter you might have to go. This can include CIOs, department heads, or key individuals within the company that can show their managers the value of working with you.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to get into social media, especially as an established brand, Vision can help. We’re specialists when it comes to online branding and social media. Contact us today to start the discussion and find out what marketing plan is right for you. We’re a full-service marketing agency, specializing in comprehensive internet marketing – from websites to social media and everything in-between.
